The Hand but Not the Heart eBook

would suffocate me. There was a mutual wrong
in our marriage; but I was most to blame; for I knew
that I did not and never could love you as I believed
a husband should be loved. But you had extorted
from me a promise of marriage, and I believed it to
be my duty to fulfill that promise. Young, inexperienced,
blind to the future, I took up the burdens you laid
at my feet, and believed myself strong enough to carry
them all the days of my life. It was a fatal
error. How painfully I have struggled on—­how
prayerfully, how patiently, how self-denyingly, you
can never know. Yet, without avail. I have
fallen by the way, and there is not strength enough
in me to lift the burdens again. I know this,
and One besides; and I am content to rest the case
with Him. The world will blame—­the
church censure—­the law condemn. Let
it be so. All that is light to the sufferings
I have endured, and from which I have fled.

“I cannot see you, Mr. Dexter—­I
will not see you. Our ways in this world
have parted, and forever. The act was not mine,
but yours. You flung me off with a force that
overcame all scruple—­all question of right—­all
effort to cling to you as my husband. I was trying,
in my feeble way—­for not much power remained—­to
be a dutiful wife, when you extinguished all hope
of success by a charge as false as the evil spirit
who whispered in your too willing ears a suspicion
of infidelity against one who had never permitted a
thought of wrong towards her husband to enter even
the outermost portal of her mind. I had not seen
the person to whom you allude since my accidental
meeting with him at Newport, so basely construed into
design; and his passing my window at the moment you
returned home, was as unexpected to me as to you.

“I had hoped that my previous solemn assurances
were sufficient to give you confidence in my integrity.
But this was an error. You had no faith in me;
and assailed me with violence when my thoughts were
as true to honor as ever were yours. Did you imagine
that I could lie passive at your feet, so trampled
down and degraded? No, sir! God gave me
a higher consciousness—­a purer spirit—­a
nobler individuality! You should have mated one
of a different stamp from me!

“And yet I pity you, Leon Dexter! This
web of trouble, which your own hands have woven around
your life, will fetter and gall you at every step
in your future journey. I have not left you in
a spirit of retaliation; but simply because the natural
strain of repulsion was stronger than all the attractive
forces that held us together. I only obeyed a
law against which weak nature strove in vain.
Were it in my power, I would make all your future
bright with the warmest sunshine. But over your
future I have no control—­yet, sadly enough,
are our destinies linked, and the existence of each
will be a thorn in the other’s heart.